Gamers of the new generation generally* don't match up with the characteristics of old MMORPGs (the "Korean grindcore" types). They no longer have the ability or desire to devote a lot of their time to a single game and are much less willing to repeat boring tasks at the prospect of rewards. They want pretty much instant gratification and gameplay without much hassle and waiting.

So while the kind of MMO's you saw 10-15 years ago are a dying breed (in the West at least), the "Age of MMOs" definitely hasn't ended yet. MMOs have simply evolved to be more suitable with the new generation of gamers.

* Note: generally. As in, a generalization. There may be outliers. Don't bother responding something like "hey ur theory is flawed cause im from this generation and i still love doing this and that"

I actually believe MMOs have some of the most loyal players. Not many other games can keep people for 10years. OP forgets that the game is evolving and has to do so not only to attract new players, but also to keep the old-timers not bored with same things.

Um... might want to do some research there OP before talking about "competitors" to WoW. For example, DDO and LotRO play NOTHING like WoW outside of being MMO's with a third person perspective and based on source material that eventually influenced warcraft.

The rest is mostly garbage, sorry. Many of the point you make are downright wrong, or are opinions that you're throwing around as fact.

I will give you the loss of community. From wotlk into cataclysm where we saw more queues for content, I felt the game diminish for me. I found it harder to meet new players, PVP was where I found my self and I lacked the computer to stay truly competitive.

Why did it diminish for me? Because I found queue based content.... creepy. Silent people everywhere, not a word spoken, not a hello, not a hey lets get ready.... just a creepy silence. More often than not I would be in a 5 man where not a word was spoken by anyone other than me. I found it odd.

I tried to form my own groups for 5 mans, and I managed it many times, but it got harder to accomplish as time went on. People just told me to queue up and shut up. I am fairly social and even on other game websites I find players who do not even type a good luck or have fun to be creepy.

You know, it's late, but I did feel a bit of what you're talking about here. Sooo.....

Originally Posted by CaptainV

The thing is... WoW is a great MMO, it was so great, that these things became an obvious marketing campaign, in many ways we owe WoW a lot including and not limited to:
- Making the PC a globally known console to consider cool to use.
- Publishing PC gaming as a marketing brand.
- Adding significant development interest in PC gaming and more namely online gaming.

As a result, money becomes the priority and at the cost of quality, quality drops because quantity makes more cash.

This, is where the MMO decline began.

You probably aren't wrong here. I'm not sure WoW was ever as revolutionary as folks will claim it to be, although at the time it certainly wrapped most good points of other titles up into one package, and tried to do away with what was considered 'bad', and was the only one (to my knowledge) that had the snowball fanbase of several very successful prior games backing it.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

You see, it became clear that WoW's success was going to be a task few could ever reach, come on, 12.5 million subs? That's an impressive market, everyone wants that pie, and they're going to make games like WoW to get a piece.

Of course, market leaders are almost always considered the watermark that can and should be exceeded, and never simply a 'lightning in a bottle' scenario, which WoW certainly was. You can thank shareholders for this mindset, but that's another topic entirely.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

You see, players don't actually like having to do something twice unless there's an incentive to do it. Players have zero motivation to repeat the same content because in a game where the same content is uninteresting, or simply productive instead of immersion, there is no real joy in the experience so much as the relief its over.

This is what happens when you remove risk and consequence from the game, something that WoW has unfortunately NOT derived from the greats before it. Decisions and actions become ultimately meaningless, and so does the gameplay.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

Our golden era of glory wasn't really golden so much as quantified. We remember it because of its flaws, not because of its greatness, we remember what we wanted to see improve, raging at the forums for hours about class imbalances and difficulty settings.

Looking back at the games I played prior to WoW, I recall them exactly because of their greatness. When you died out on the Obsidian Plains in AC, and it was 2 in the morning, and you had no idea exactly where your corpse was, and holy fuck I just died 3 more times trying to find it, and who's around from my guild to help me, I'm going to lose my 6 best items.... yeah, that sort of involvement in a game isn't something WoW has ever been able to deliver. Not ever. Folks playing this game now would look at such things as digital masochism, but having seen both sides of the fence? Yeah, said players just don't get it.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

Its not the game that's changed, its you, the player that has changed. You expect more yet you demand less, you want harder content yet you want it to be easier to access, you want a challenge yet you don't want to grind for it.

Maybe we're reading different forums, but I never EVER see requests for harder content. Not ever. It's always a request to make process x take less time, because having 6 raid geared level 90's isn't enough, and i have a wife and kids, and somehow delude myself into thinking that I play less now, and why are repair bills so high, and wiping is simply brutal.

Blizz themselves actually promotes this mindset by attempting to placate it in the first place.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

So Cataclysm came and revamped our old world, made some more engaging quest lines for leveling but at the cost of the freedom to explore and the enjoyment of going where you pleased to do that content.

Now while it isn't strictly true, you can still go where you please, yet... it doesn't feel the same, it feels, changed, forced, streamlined.

It feels streamlined because that's exactly what it is. Badlands storyline, for example, was a vast improvement over pre-Cata. The new story is well worth any players time, and is (was) rather heart wrenching. But it also plays out the SAME exact way every time you visit that zone. Granted, this probably wasn't in the forefront of the dev teams mind when they set out to do an old world revamp, but the 'on rails' aspect of most zones now is one of the things that keeps Warcraft from being an innovator in its field.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

In fact, id argue that the older quests were not only harder, but downright unforgiving, sometimes your ability to progress was downright impossible, because unless you were prepared to farm mobs for HOURs just to get levels (and believe me I remember that well) you needed a group to kill elites that were literally un-soloable.

It was "not" fun.

Multiplayer content in a multiplayer game? Stop the presses.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

To be honest, it hasn't changed that much, I was 16 when I started and now I'm 24, that's 8 years of playing this game and I think back and remember how much I hated grinding then and how much I hate it now.

MMO's probably weren't for you then, and they still aren't. The genre, done properly, doesn't hand you anything overnight, and makes each step of progression feel like a small victory. Because easily attained goals are meaningless and unrewarding.

Has anyone ever shouted "FUCK yeah, I'm level 2!!!"

Probably not.

Do people howl like banshees the first time they down a raid boss they've been working on for weeks? Yes, yes they do. Even the ones that don't bother to stream it

Ultimately, THAT feeling is exactly what people play MMO's for. Whether it's acquiring a new piece of gear, or being able to solo content, or defeating a raid boss, or reaching x rating in arena, hoarding gold via the AH... whatever.

Originally Posted by CaptainV

The point I'm trying to make is, I'm not the only one, you, are the same person, you, were the kid once, now your the adult, your trying to justify the old days being good, but looking back...

...Can you honestly say they were?

Absolutely. I've grown, but the reasons for playing MMO's really haven't changed, else I wouldn't be here. Most if not all the traditinally non-MMO 'features' that I see being added are addressed and executed in a far better fashion in other game genres.

I didn't read op but I would say, right now mmos are kind of a meh market. Most right now go ftp after a few months.
I imagine though that soon another "WoW" will come out and blow up the market. Just like before WoW mmos were a pretty niche market.

I think it will be the one that actually successfully combines casual + hardcore play

Your post is full of stereotypical bs and assumptions that you can't really prove. If you really grew up in the 90's and you are 2 decates old, you should know by now that when you say something you really need to have proof to back it up.

I am literally speechless, not sure if you are trying to troll or serious >.>

MMOs are mutating, as devs continue to iterate and innovate old concepts, and an entire multi-generational vertical-and-horizontal social complex of gamers evolves and grows up in a gaming world almost entirely saturated with online interaction from the beginning.

If anything, persistent, social, interactable worlds are becoming the gold standard for a lot of genres or game designs. It's less that "MMOs are dead" and more that MMOs have melted and seeped into the fiber of every genre.

Maybe it's more that the need to label stuff "MMO!!!!" is dying off because, well, yeah... duh it's online and full of other people. Why wouldn't it be?

If you're referring specifically to the "grind-and-gear" model of MMORPGs, then, yes, those are on the outs because it's a — if you'll pardon my frankness — stupid waste of time, and earning stuff in the real world is more fun than grinding up a meter in a fake one you won't even be playing in 6 months. Especially if you're paying for the privilege of doing it.

Then Final Fantasy 14 is going to be screwed like WoW because it's a grind fest, and you need to waddle through a horrible main plot to try everything the game has to offer* (crafting and gathering are pretty painful to go through, and you will have to grind all of the other classes after you get your first class to 50). That fake bar doesn't move very fast even when you have leveled a bunch of classes.

*Making you unlock the Auction House let alone a bank is probably one of the stupidest fucking things in a MMO, and is just as bad as WoW daily grinding.

I honestly laugh when I realize how much time some people waste on trying to write some fancy forum post. I stopped reading after the first couple of paragraphs and noticed there were like 11 more.....sigh. MMO's will never die.

You lost me at the assumption that I found Shaohao grinding an issue. I didn't.

It was a refreshing change from all the other "do dailies / hand in items / run instance X" reps. It wasn't the most fleshed out experience ever, and I wouldn't do it on more than one character, but as something for my main to do, it was ok.

And when I look at Timeless Isle and I see how much fun I've been having there, and how that is such a stark departure from the experience I've had with previous content patches, I cannot agree that what's wrong with the game is me. On the contrary, what's been wrong with the game - as far as I am concerned - is the direction the development teams have taken.

what wow has done is taking the mmo genre out of a niche and put it on the main stage right beside sport games and fps; according to wikipedia till wow succes no mmo ever reached the 500k subs, ultima online stopped at 250k, everquest hold 430k subs, Daoc 250k etc.
The problem is that with big numbers and alot of money dancing on the table, companies like EA stepped in ruining every damn product coming out and changing it to be wow clone hoping for a similar success even SOE have ruined a fantastic game like Star Wars Galaxy trying hard to make it a wow clone and ending up with it's hands empty.
If i should name 2 companies that never cared about wow but have build their own mmo and probably succeding at it are: CCP with EvE online that still there and running strong and recently Wargaming with World of Tanks they got the courage to not copy wow and explore new ways in the mmo genre and have been repayed by players.

Originally Posted by caervek

Obviously this issue doesn't affect me however unlike some raiders I don't see the point in taking satisfaction in this injustice, it's wrong, just because it doesn't hurt me doesn't stop it being wrong, the player base should stand together when Blizzard do stupid shit like this not laugh at the ones being victimised.